[HN Gopher] Ntfs2btrfs does in-place conversion of NTFS filesyst...
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Ntfs2btrfs does in-place conversion of NTFS filesystem to the open-
source Btrfs
Author : Sami_Lehtinen
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-11-30 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| johnea wrote:
| Conversion from one bloatware filesystem to another...
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| btrfs isn't that terrible for desktop use right now. I mean, I
| wouldn't personally use it, I lost data on it a couple times
| four plus years ago, but it's come a long way since then. (my
| preference is keep everything I care about on a fileserver like
| truenas running zfs with proper snapshotting, replication and
| backup and live dangerously on the desktop testing out
| bcachefs, but I recognize not everyone can live my life and
| some people just want a laptop with a reasonable filesystem
| resistant to bit rot.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I recently found out Fedora defaults to btrfs with zstd
| compression enabled by default. Seems to work well enough.
|
| On my personal devices I prefer BTRFS' snapshotting ability
| over the risk of having to restore from backup at some point.
| arjvik wrote:
| How is bcachefs for personal use these days?
| chasil wrote:
| The political situation for bcachefs is far from good, with
| pressure from Linus and a CoC violation.
|
| The net effect will likely delay stability.
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Fixes-Two-Choices
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-CoC-Bcachefs-6.13
| biorach wrote:
| I believe the main bcachefs mantainer does not advocate
| production use yet
| fragmede wrote:
| honestly I think btrfs isn't bloated enough for today's VM-
| enabled world. ext4 and xfs and hell, exfat haven't gone
| anywhere, and if those fulfill your needs, just use those. but
| if you need more advanced features that btrfs or zfs bring,
| those added features are quite welcome. imo, btrfs could use
| the benefits of being a cluster filesystem on top of everything
| it already does because having a VM be able to access a disk
| that is currently mounted by the host or another VM would
| useful. imagine if the disk exported to the VM could be mounted
| by another VM, either locally or remote simultaneously.
| arguably ceph fills this need, but having a btrfs-native
| solution for that would be useful.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Running VMs (and database servers) on btrfs performs really
| bad so you have to disable CoW for them.
|
| Otherwise you'll get situations where your 100GB VM image
| will use over a TB of physical disk space.
|
| It's a shame really that this still isn't solved.
| irusensei wrote:
| Checksum self healing on ZFS and BTRFS saved my data from
| janky custom NAS setups more times that I can count.
| Compression is also nice but the thing I like most is the
| possibility of creating many partition-like sub volumes
| without needing to allocate or manage space.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| What filesystem would you suggest that has data checksums,
| efficient snapshots, and doesn't require compiling an out of
| tree kernel module?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| zfs is licensed _too freely_ to be in-tree, but it's still an
| excellent choice.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| Yeah the situation is unfortunate. There's a decent chance
| I'd be using ZFS if not for the licensing issues, but as a
| practical matter I'm getting too old to be futzing with
| kernel modules on my daily driver.
| telgareith wrote:
| DKMS solved these "licensing issues." Dell is mum on
| official motivation- but it provides a licensing
| demarcation point, and a way for kernels to update
| without breaking modules- so it's easier for companies to
| develop for Linux.
|
| _Windows Drivers work the same way and nobody huffs and
| puffs about that_
|
| I'd love to have an intelligent discussion on how one
| person's opinion on licensing issues stacks up against
| the legal teams of half the fortune 50's. Licensing
| doesn't work on "well, I didn't mean it THAT way."
| riffraff wrote:
| I may be wrong but I don't think it's just "excessive
| freeness", the CDDL also has restrictions the GPL does not
| have (stuff about patents), it's mutual incompatibility.
|
| Apache v2 and GPLv3 were made explicitly compatible while
| providing different kinds of freedom.
| chasil wrote:
| In the _Linux_ tree.
|
| In Windows, Satya would need to write Larry a check. It
| would probably be hefty.
|
| Edit: there was a time that this was planned for MacOS.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-
| ap...
| JackSlateur wrote:
| Xfs ? Bcachefs ? Whatever you like because those features may
| not be implemented at the filesystem layer ?
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| xfs doesn't have data checksumming.
|
| > Note: Unlike Btrfs and ZFS, the CRC32 checksum only
| applies to the metadata and not actual data.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XFS
|
| ---
|
| bcachefs isn't stable enough to daily drive.
|
| > Nobody sane uses bcachefs and expects it to be stable
|
| --Linus Torvalds (2024)
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-%3Dwj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v%3
| D...
| JackSlateur wrote:
| (read my comment again)
| toast0 wrote:
| Zfs is in tree if you use a different kernel. :p
| chasil wrote:
| There is an OpenZFS port to Windows, but I'm not sure how to
| find it from here:
|
| https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin
|
| There is also Microsoft's own ReFS:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS
| the_hoser wrote:
| The degree of hold-my-beer here is off the charts.
| koverstreet wrote:
| It's not quite as dangerous as you'd think.
|
| The standard technique is to reserve a big file on the old
| filesystem for the new filesystem metadata, and then walk all
| files on the old filesystem and use fiemap() to create new
| extents that point to the existing data - only writing to the
| space you reserved.
|
| You only overwrite the superblock at the very end, and you can
| verify that the old and new filesystems have the same contents
| before you do.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I believe that is also the method [btrfs-
| convert](https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Convert.html)
| uses. A cool trick that tool uses is to keep the ext4
| structures on disk (as a subvolume), which allows reverting
| to ext4 if the conversion didn't go as planned (as long as
| you don't do anything to mess with the ext4 extents, such as
| defragmenting or balancing the filesystem, and you can't
| revert after deleting the subvolume of course).
| boricj wrote:
| A couple of years ago it was more like juggling chainsaws:
| https://github.com/maharmstone/ntfs2btrfs/issues/9
|
| I tracked down a couple of nasty bugs at that time playing
| around with it, hopefully it's more stable now.
| chasil wrote:
| Note this is not the Linux btrfs:
|
| "WinBtrfs is a Windows driver for the next-generation Linux
| filesystem Btrfs. A reimplementation from scratch, it contains
| no code from the Linux kernel, and should work on any version
| from Windows XP onwards. It is also included as part of the
| free operating system ReactOS."
|
| This is from the ntfs2btrfs maintainer's page.
|
| https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs
| chungy wrote:
| It's the same file system, with two different drivers for two
| different operating systems.
| chasil wrote:
| The metadata is adjusted for Windows in a way that is
| foreign to Linux.
|
| Do Linux NTFS drivers deal with alternate streams?
|
| "Getting and setting of Access Control Lists (ACLs), using
| the xattr security.NTACL"
|
| "Alternate Data Streams (e.g. :Zone.Identifier is stored as
| the xattr user.Zone.Identifier)"
| biorach wrote:
| Not sure what point you're making here. WinBtrfs is a
| driver for the same btrfs filesystem that Linux uses.
| It's most common use case is reading the Linux partitions
| in Windows on machines that dual-boot both operating
| systems
| cwillu wrote:
| Yes it is?
| MisterTea wrote:
| As someone who has witnessed Windows explode twice from in-
| place upgrades I would just buy a new disk or computer and
| start over. I get that this is different but the time that went
| into that data is worth way more than a new disk. It's just not
| worth the risk IMO. Maybe if you don't care about the data or
| have good backups and wish to help shake bugs out - go for it I
| guess.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I would be very surprised if it supported files that are under
| LZX compression.
|
| (Not to be confused with Windows 2000-era file compression, this
| is something you need to activate with "compact.exe /C /EXE:LZX
| (filename)")
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(page generated 2024-11-30 23:00 UTC)